CONCEPT
Collective Bargaining by Code
The contemporary equivalent of Thompson's collective bargaining by riot — the use of lawsuits, strikes, petitions, and viral campaigns by workers in the knowledge economy to assert interests that formal governance mechanisms refuse to acknowledge.
The term describes the improvised political practice of AI-affected workers who possess specific grievances but lack formal institutions for their negotiation. The artists filing class-action lawsuits, the actors striking over likeness replication, the writers petitioning against the use of their work in training data, the engineers leaving companies to raise public safety concerns — each is engaged in an activity that, at the level of structural function, performs what Thompson identified in the eighteenth-century crowd: the assertion of interests that formal governance refuses to acknowledge. The strength of the practice is speed and responsiveness. The weakness is fragility: each action compels a moment of attention without creating the durable institutional structure through which interests are represented continuously over time.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The phenomenon differs from traditional labor action in scale and coordination. The Authors Guild letter gathered ten thousand signatures in days, leveraging digital networks that permit rapid information-sharing and